What you keep missing is that the *difference* is actually in the glibc versions. You keep talking about the Linux *kernel* improving to match FreeBSD. When, in fact, the problem was in glibc-2.6. There is no inconsistency in the benchmarks. 2.6.22 beats FreeBSD 7.0 with glibc-2.7, and does not with glibc-2.6. I believe there was some kernel regression in 2.6.23 when Linux switched schedulers. It would be interesting to see 2.6.24 results. But I imagine we will see 2.6.25 final results next month, at which point your claim that we should be testing against the FreeBSD8 development version will be moot.

And no, no one in their right mind would run the FreeBSD 8 development version on a production server right now... or a month from now.

However, I'm very happy to see that FreeBSD is back up to snuff after all this time. I'm sure that a lot of people worked very hard on that come-back.